


You Give Your Hand to Me

by endemictoearth



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Genre: F/M, Hands, Holding Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-24
Updated: 2014-01-24
Packaged: 2018-04-08 13:45:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4307370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endemictoearth/pseuds/endemictoearth





	You Give Your Hand to Me

She had always felt self-conscious about her hands. Even though she weighed 16 stone and towered over the boys in her class, and had never had a single comment made about them, she still thought they were ugly. 

She used to bite her nails. One of the many coping mechanisms, a calming behavior in that she felt calm when she was doing it, methodically chomping away, but then felt this rush of guilt and shame when she stopped. Somehow, she wasn’t sure how, she’d made a resolution to stop in Year 9, and had stuck with it. She still had compulsive behaviors, eating, counting, the light-switch thing which drove her mother round the twist, but she’d managed to stop this one thing.

But her hands still bothered her. She kept her nails short, to reduce the temptation to slide back into old habits, and though her fingers were long, they didn’t seem long due to their pudginess. And she always seemed to have at least one hangnail, usually more. Her cuticles were a fright, despite her mother saying, “Just push them back with a flannel in the bath; they’ll soon look alright!” She could never remember.

So, she ended up putting her hands in her lap, or sitting on them. Often, she curled her fingers around surfaces, desks, tables, books, or made little fists while she was walking. 

PDA didn’t embarrass her, she kind of liked seeing someone get some action, since she certainly wasn’t. But she felt a greater pang in her stomach when she saw two people holding hands than when she saw a couple kissing. Kissing might be more intimate, but hand-holding seemed to mean something more. It was one person saying to another, without having to utter a word, “I don’t want to lose you. I want to make absolutely certain I know where you are, and that that somewhere is next to me.” 

All of this being a rambling preamble to the moment when Finn picked up her hand to write in her palm. In one second, her knees went weak, her mouth went dry, and all the excess liquid in her body seemed to head straight to moisten her lady garden. She couldn’t even tell what he wrote at first … and by the time she had, he seemed to doubt himself, and in the next second she felt sick. 

She hadn’t even had time to feel self-conscious about the state of her hand, and when she thought about it later, she couldn’t remember Finn making a face when he looked at it. 

And then, when they went to the rave, he touched her hand again, helping her off the motorbike.

Thinking over the evolution of their relationship, up until last night, when he’d written those three words on her back, and they’d each clasped their own hands together, feeling every bit as shy and unsure as they looked, Rae wondered if it was real. But then she remembered the moment, just after Finn had said, “So, what now?” when he leaned forward, grabbed her hand, and tugged on it to say, “Come on, we’re heading back to the reception.” 

He probably didn’t know how much that meant to her. They still hadn’t kissed, but he touched her. He held her hand, one of the things she liked least about herself, without hesitation, and he kept holding it all the way back to the pub. He held it as they walked through the door, and when they sat down at their table with the gang, he only let go long enough for her to arrange her skirt before he took it up again. And, the crazy thing was, they seemed to fit. Even though she was a tiny bit taller, and outweighed him by at least three stone, their hands just … fit. There wasn’t that strange feeling that someone had one too many fingers, or that their fingers were wildly disproportionate. His palm was a little rough, and hers was slightly damp, but together they felt just right. And though she chatted to Izzy about Chop’s declaration, and Finn talked to Archie about the crap music, at least half of their brains were taken up with the fact that they were holding onto each other. 

Finn held her hand all the way to her front door. And though he gently kissed her cheek to say good night, that didn’t thrill her as much as when he squeezed her hand before he finally, reluctantly, let it go. 


End file.
